Today, people can communicate with each other through a variety of methods. Meetings between two or more individuals located at physically distinct locations may be conducted on a telephone and through video conferences. Video conferencing allows individuals at remote locations to interact and exchange information through electronic means. A video conference typically includes full motion video presentations that are conducted across any number of communications networks and displayed on video conferencing systems located at the remote locations. The video conferencing systems generally include a camera and a microphone to capture the video and audio information at the particular location, a monitor that allows the participants at one location to view and hear the participants at the remote location and a computer device that processes the audio and video information that is transmitted and received by the endpoint.
Each video conference occurring over a particular network may be monitored by a system or network administrator. The administrator typically is not physically located near any of the endpoints participating the video conferences. The administrator may monitor the video conferences occurring on a particular network but has no way of remotely determining whether network factors, such as jitter, latency and throughput, are causing the decrease in quality of the audio and video streams in the conference. Therefore, it is practically impossible for the administrator to make a real-time determination whether the network factors are the root cause of the poor audio and/or video quality experienced by the users, or whether the network is operating beyond thresholds that would make poor audio and video quality a likely result.
Furthermore, video conferencing systems are typically distributed over large geographic areas and video conferences typically occur between two or more locations that are remote to the administrator. In order to diagnose some problems that may be related to the network, an administrator must travel to the remote locations or a skilled network professional must be located at each one of the remote sites. The administrator can then determine if latency, jitter and throughput are causing the decrease in quality in the audio and video streams.